A pre birthday dinner

Anne has just flitted off on her latest trip -- to the Arctic of all places.  She could reasonably be called a travel-holic at the moment.

Which is ironic as I am travel-phobic these days.  I went everywhere I wanted to go in my 30s and it all seems too much bother now.  So she mostly travels with her good-humoured sister or goes alone.  She is a very friendly lady so she still has a lot of social interaction even when she travels alone.

But the amusing thing is that Joe and Kate seem to be in a similar situation.  Joe and I are very different people. He seems to be much more kind-hearted than I am, as one thing. Like his mother he is generally kind whereas I am kind mostly to people I approve of.

But "Like father like son" does emerge at times.  Joe is uninterested in travel too.  But Kate wants to see it all.  Joe took her on a trip all around Europe  about a year ago and apparently thought that he had done his travel duty with that.  When Kate wanted to flit off again he pointed out to her that he had visited eight countries with her.  "But that's just Europe" was her reply. Anyway, latest news is that she is visiting Canada on her own this year.

There are other ways that "Like father like son" emerges.  Two trivial but amusing ways are that we both buy rice bubbles but rarely eat them and we both sit down in an odd way, with the foot of one leg tucked under the other leg.  There is a rather attractive young lady below showing how it's done.  Both Joe and I do it quite unconsciously.  It just seems natural to us.



It so happens that Anne's 39th birthday will come up when she is away this year.  So I offered to take her out for a birthday dinner before she departed.  I took her to a dinner at the Yeronga digger's club.  We mostly go there on a Friday, when they have what must be the best smorgasbord in town.  So I thought that would be as pretty good birthday offering.  This time however we went on a Tuesday, which was quite different.  It was a "two for Tuesday" night.  Which meant that you got two meals for the price of one.  And the place was packed for it.  We were lucky to get a table.  The menu was rather small and basic so the only vaguely interesting thing I could find on it were "Toulouse sausages".  But it turned out that they were quite nice.

Anyway, I also took her to The Phams for breakfast next morning, where she had a Vietnamese omelette, a big and very tasty meal. 

While we were there a mother and a pretty little 10 year old daughter walked in. As soon as the mother lined up to order, the daughter zipped over to the the newspapers, got a "Courier Mail" and started reading it.  The wait was a bit long, however, so as soon as she had taken a good look at the local newspaper, she went over and  got "The Australian" and started reading it.  She was obviously VERY bright for her age.  Her mother had her in a pretty dress and her hair was nicely done so she seemed otherwise quite normal.  I would have LOVED to have her as a daughter.  I have seen many kids in that restaurant but she was the only one ever to display such adult behaviour.  It made my day.

I was an odd one in my childhood too. Most kids have on their bedroom walls posters of sports and movie stars.  I had a big map of Taiwan on my wall, which was big in the news at that time. I actually wrote to Taipei to get that map.